Consumer products are generally offered for sale in packages, the package may hold the item, protect the item during storage, enhance a visual presentation of the item, protect the item against aging, decay, etc. In particular food and beverage items are distributed in packages, such as bottles, blisters, trays, etc. Such packages provide for a large amount of waste materials as the package is used once and therefore considered rubbish once the food or beverage item has been consumed. Many approaches have been followed up to now in order to reduce overall amounts of rubbish. Two are briefly described below.
In many countries, deposit systems have been in use for packages such as bottles made of glass or plastic. When a consumer purchases the item, a deposit is charged for the package. When the consumer returns the empty package, the deposit is returned. Although re-use of the package or recycling of the package material may be provided by such a system, an overall efficiency is low, as the returned packages will require collection at the points of return (e.g. a supermarket deposit return station), sorting at the point of return, and return of the sorted packages to their thus providing for high transportation cost and logistic efforts. Furthermore, deposit systems may not be suitable or commercially feasible for all packages.
Another possibility is to provide collection bins where consumers can leave their empty packages. The collection bins may for example be provided per material category: paper, glass, plastics, etc. Further refined sorting may be provided by enlarging a number of collection bins in order to enable a more refined recollection: e.g. transparent glass, green glass, brown glass, paper, cardboard, textiles, batteries, shoes, etc. Although to some extent effective, this system still requires separate logistics streams for the selected items. Also, refined recollection schemes are virtually impossible to implement, as a consumer may not be able or willing to reliably and consistently distinguish and separate materials such as various plastic types (polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, etc.) from each other. Firstly, the consumer cannot always distinguish such materials from each other. Secondly, a correspondingly large number of waste collection containers would consume a large space (e.g. in shopping malls, on parking lots, etc.). Thirdly, a recollection of a correspondingly large number of different materials would make the recollection process more complex hence less economical.
During production of e.g. consumable goods, a desire to recognize the package may also arise. For example, in a bottle filling process, whereby bottles, such as PET bottles or other packages are filled, a recognition of the type of package may be desired, in order to verify that a package is filled with its matching product.